Here we are, well out in the big blue, rolling, rolling, sailing on to England. Out here, I feel as if the ocean is alive, as if it is living and breathing, and moody, oh so moody! Sometimes it is calm and smooth, as if it were asleep; and sometimes it is playful, splashing and rolling; and sometimes it is angry and knocks us about. It’s as if the ocean has many sides, like me.
We spent yesterday in major work mode because two grommets on the mainsail tore out. Uncle Stew and Brian fluttered around trying to find someone to blame. Apparently whoever let out the sail (Uncle Stew says it was Cody; Cody says it was Brian) forgot to also let out the outhaul line, so the tension was too great along one side of the sail and pop went the grommets.
Grommets. Slides. Outhaul. I already knew what these words meant, but Cody cannot get them in his head—or if he can, he refuses to use the right words. He calls the grommets hole thingys and the slides metal thingys and the outhaul that line thingy. He and Uncle Stew had a major fight yesterday when Cody was telling him about the hole thingys tearing and coming away from the metal-slide thingys.
“What the heck are you talking about?” Uncle Stew yelled at Cody. “You sound like an idjit. You don’t belong on this boat if you can’t learn the proper names for things.”
“I know what I’m doing, even if I don’t call things by their la-dee-dah names,” Cody said.
“There’s a reason why everything has a name,” Uncle Stew insisted. He was poking Cody’s shoulder with his finger. “What are you going to say in an emergency? Help! The hole thingy is loose!?”
“Quit poking me,” Cody said.
Their arguing roused Uncle Mo from his bunk down below. “You calling my son an idjit?” Uncle Mo demanded.
Uncle Stew reeled around and faced Uncle Mo. “I said he sounds like an idjit half the time—”
“So you’re calling him an idjit? And you think that wimpy son of yours is smarter than my son? Is that what you’re saying?” Then Uncle Mo started jabbing his finger at Uncle Stew.
Uncle Stew pushed Uncle Mo. “Brian has more brains in his little toe than Cody has in his whole idjit body!”
I think they were just about to toss a few blows when Uncle Dock intervened.
“Knock it off,” Uncle Dock said. “There isn’t room on this boat for grown men to be acting like spoiled kids.”
“You calling me a spoiled kid?” Uncle Mo shouted.
“Yep,” Uncle Dock said.
Uncle Mo sucked in a load of air and sputtered it out and turned around to Cody and said, “Why do you always have to start something?”
“Me?” Cody said.
“Yes, you,” Uncle Mo said. “Now get down below and start making lunch!”
Cody just shook his head and went down below, and Uncle Mo followed him. I heard them yelling at each other for a while, and then it was quiet, and pretty soon they brought lunch up for the rest of us, and everyone sat around not looking at each other, just eating lunch and trying to forget the fight.
This morning we saw the sun for the first time since we left Grand Manan, and it sure was a welcome sight. Sun, sun, sun! Beautiful brilliant sun! Everyone wanted to be on deck, worshiping it. It wrapped us all in the most brilliant light and warmed our faces and our bones; it dried our clothes; it flickered along the waves.
The repair work we had to do was easier with the sun beaming down on us. We took down the mainsail, dried off the ripped grommet holes, and put strips of sticky-back sail tape around the sides of the sail to cover the holes. The sail tape wasn’t sticky enough, though, so I stitched along the sides to keep them secure.
Brian couldn’t resist saying, “It’s a good thing we have a girl aboard so she can sew things.”
Grrrr. Sewing sails is heavy work! The material is stiff and thick, and you have to use special needles and a palm thimble to push the needle through.
After I stitched the sails, Cody and I punched new holes through the sailcloth and put in new brass grommets. Cody lashed some thin line through the new grommet holes to the slides, and we were done.
In full hearing of Uncle Stew, Cody said, “Look, Sierra-Oscar. We done fixed up the hole thingys and now they’ll work on the metal thingys easy peasy.” He smiled at Uncle Stew, and before Uncle Stew could erupt, Cody said, “And, Sierra-Oscar, if you want to use fancy words, you can call these hole thingys grommets and you can call these metal thingys slides.”
Before we raised the sail again, Cody noticed that the outhaul line (“the line thingy, but if you want to use its fancy word you should call it an outhaul line,” he said) up by the boom was chafing, so I got my bosun’s chair and harness and hooked myself up to the halyard, and Cody hauled me up. Usually I try to haul myself up, but when the waves are big, you just want to concentrate on not smashing into the mast.
As soon as I was a couple of inches off the deck, I was flying out over the waves, swinging in my chair, while the boat tossed and turned like a runaway seesaw. You swing out over the rolling waves, and the boat rolls and the waves roll and you roll, and you are up in the air in the wind, flying along!
I taped up the line as slowly as I could so that I’d have as much time up there as possible.
“What’s the matter, Sophie?” Uncle Stew called. “Having trouble? Can’t do it?”
“I’m doing just fine, Sierra-Tango-Echo-Whiskey,” I said. I was just about to add “you idjit” to that, but then I looked down on him and he looked so small below, small and rumpled and a little pitiful, so I swallowed the “idjit” part.
Our fish count is zero. I don’t know what we’re doing wrong. I’m relieved, though. I hated killing those fish.
But we’ve seen birds (where do they come from?) and they love the lures. Today a gull tried to make a grab for the lure but instead got tangled in the line. Cody made a dramatic rescue, pulling the bird on deck and untangling the line from around its wing and then gently placing it back in the water.
“Bye-bye, birdie,” Cody called as it floated away.
We also saw dolphins last night and again this morning—three of them leaping and diving, having a grand time.
“Hello-oooo, darlings!” Cody called.
I love to see the dolphins. I feel as if they are messengers. For me.
This morning’s sun didn’t last long, and now there is rain, rain, more rain. We’ve also had serious fog at night, but good wind.
Last night in the fog, when Brian and I were scanning the radar, we spotted two blips moving together about five miles northeast of us. We figured this was a tugboat pulling a barge. We then noticed another blip about three miles southeast of us, moving fast and right for us, so I went up on deck and blew the air horn, and Cody tried to call the vessel on the radio. No reply.
It was a tense time. It’s eerie when you can’t see anything and yet the radar tells you something is near. You keep expecting to be rammed by a huge ship zooming out of the fog. My heart was pound-pound-pounding, expecting that huge something to appear any minute.
We turned on the engine and prepared to change course if the thing got closer than two miles, but then the blip blew right past us. A little later, five more blips, but still no answer on the radio. It was scary, fearing that a big barge could plow right over you and keep going, not even knowing it had hit you.
Uncle Stew spent a lot of time flipping through manuals, and what he concluded is that since we’d been getting cloudbursts all night, our radar was probably picking up rain clouds! We felt stupid to think that we’d been blowing our horn at rain clouds and trying to call them on the radio.
Morale seems okay among the boat family today, but we don’t get enough sleep. I think the reason we seem so tired—beyond not getting unbroken stretches of sleep—is that every thing we do, even the simplest of actions, requires such effort. Just walking a few steps is a major production. It’s like rock climbing, where you have to plot where each hand and each foot is going to go before you can actually move.
I walk at the pace of a ninety-year-old woman or someone with broken legs. You have to brace yourself at every wave and be prepared for the shock of slamming into a wall. You can’t stand freely for more than a few seconds without losing your balance from the motion of the boat.
Cooking is difficult because even though the stove is on a gimbal, which rocks around with the boat to keep the surface level, everything else flies around, spills, falls off shelves, and generally makes a mess.
When you eat, you can’t ever let go of your plate, and you can’t drink while you eat because then you’d have to put something down, and you don’t have enough hands.
Sleeping is another challenge. You keep odd hours; there’s always lots of noise (things clanging about, people bumping into things, sails flapping, people talking); you sleep in a different bed every time (whichever one is empty); and there’s always the threat of rolling out of your bed and having things fly off shelves and onto your head, or having a leak appear over your sleeping bag.
But still, in spite of all that, I like living on a boat. I like being this whole self-contained unit that can charge across the ocean with the wind.
Last night, in my fitful sleep, I dreamed my recurring dream, the one with The Wave. It rose up so high, towering higher, higher, a huge black wall of water, and then it curled at the top and I was a little blot beneath it and down turned The Wave and I woke up with my mouth wide open, ready to scream.
I hate that dream.